4x may be about right for that particular drive under EAC. Speed will very a lot with different drives under EAC, some are pretty fast (approaching 20x) while others rip much more slowly. If you can actually get those kinds of speeds in CDex with full paranoia mode, that sounds like maybe it'd be a better choice for you. Personally I use EAC because of many of the extra features it has in relation to offsets, cue file generation, burning, etc.

Maybe a firmware update could help? http://www.liteonit.twEAC behaves quite strangely speed-wise on my system too, sometimes (depending on the IDE configuration). Try running only one drive at a time as secondary master - does that make a difference?

smackbagder, I'm sorry but that's about the maximum you can get with your current drives.

You see, for efficient EAC use your drive has to have the magical combination "accurate stream, doesn't cache audio, supports C2", where the C2 support must be verified with experiments. Unfortunately most drives seem to have "accurate stream, caches audio, doesn't support C2" which renders them useless for EAC secure ripping.

Audio caching is dangerous because EAC would get identical data straight from the drive's cache with both reading cycles even when the sector is damaged. EAC works around this by resetting the cache between every reading cycle slowing the process down quite a bit.

Your Liteon as well as Pioneer do cache audio data which slows the ripping process down terribly. But no need to worry, with my HP 9310i I get 2.3x maximum at secure mode

Originally posted by smackbadger I'm trying out EAC based on the high praise given to it on this site, but I'm wondering if I've got something set wrong because it seems really slow.

I've tried using both my Liteon 24x10x40 CDR and Pioneer DVD-104s drives and the best speed I can get is ~4x...

Is it really that slow for everyone else? I can rip ~18x using CDEX with full cdparanoia mode enabled...

I had the same problem myself with my Lite-On LTR24102B burner... But the problem was easily fixed... First of all, you need firmware 5S07... Do not use the latest firmware as itīll hinder your burner from reaching the maximum speed... EAC will identify the burner as a 7.9x drive instead of 39.9x with any newer firmware... So once you have flashed your drive with the 5S07 firmware, go to the drive options menu for your Lite-On in EAC and select the tab "Offset / speed"... There youīll find something called "Speed selection", choose "39.9x" as the highest speed, and also "mark" "Allow speed reduction during extraction"... Thatīll allow your drive to reach its maximum... My record so far is 16x ripping with accurate stream, C2 and caching...

In EAC or the firmwire? My Plextor 121032 TA uses caching so, yeah, it's disabled in EAC, but that is exactly what slows it down AFAIK.

Regards stoff

Hey, Stoff...

I have the same drive, and as I recall, the firmware before 1.05 is supposed to not cache... there have been ones up to 1.09, I've updated myself thru them.

But, since I've started to seriously use EAC, and caching is a negative, I'm going to go back and see which is the best. One update pushed that drive's DAE speed to 32x, hopefully not enabling the cache at the same time..

I'm going to experiment with this myself, so I'll keep you posted with results..